This past week, BART police officer Johannes Mehserle was convicted in State court of involuntary manslaughter in the case of the New Year’s Day 2009 fatal police shooting of an unarmed man, 22-year-old Oscar Grant. The local black community is rightfully outraged, but this is much bigger than race — it’s about how our society defines justice.

Strip away all the labels; the fact remains that an armed man shot an unarmed restrained man in the back, period. This case should not be about an alleged black troublemaker and an overzealous white cop. Their race shouldn’t matter; the circumstances of why Grant was detained shouldn’t matter; and Mehserle being a cop shouldn’t matter either. Grant was a sovereign, unarmed, outnumbered, restrained, and harmless American citizen and was shot in the back in cold blood. To make matters worse, Grant was being toyed with by the cops like a domesticated cat does with a mouse before he ultimately rips him to shreds.

The scene was unequivocally premeditated first-degree murder. Furthermore, the back-up police officers who witnessed, participated in, and lied about the event should also be prosecuted as accomplices, just as you and I would be if we had done the same thing.

A justice system that allows an officer of the law to shoot a restrained man in the back with little more than a slap on the wrist, while citizens defending themselves and their families from an intruder is charged with a crime, is severely backwards. We can now chalk up our justice system as yet another gross failure of America.

I guess by now we should not be surprised that this is how our criminal government works in our upside-down society. After all, we were told that 19 members of Al Qaeda attacked us on September 11th, killing over 3000 people, and we proceed to kill well over 1 million innocent Iraqis who had nothing to do with 9/11. Does anyone still believe our decision-makers are the good guys?

It seems in every case that the media uses race, religion, patriotism, or any red herring they can conjure up to distract us from the obvious truth about right and wrong, justice, and common human decency.